I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.

So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.”

It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright.

When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment.

I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people.

I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to! And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??

Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.

I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.

I think a lot of folks feel like you should be doing these certain things like writing the great American novel or reading the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time when in actuality these are achievements that have no real guarantee of happiness. Unless you are truly enjoying those journeys, there is no reason to set upon them.

I don't think there is anything wrong with having hopes and dreams, but I do feel that maybe we allow those things to be excuses for not living a content life. I also think at times we hold onto old dreams that no longer serve us, instead of focusing on something new and more applicable to your current situation.

adulthood wasn't full of Ferraris and mansions, and I found out rather quickly that I wasn't going to save anyone, because I was struggling to save myself.

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe expresses itself, so why would I hate that? It’s the sense that, while I might fuck up, my basic worth is beyond question—I have no essential damage, I am not polluted, I am fine.

The dominant paradigm, as far as I can tell, is that you’re basically either unwell or you’re okay, and our job is triage. You’re fucked up and depressed, so you do some therapy, and/or take an SSRI, and then you don’t kill yourself.

I would like to replace it with the following paradigm. There is a spectrum of background mental states, from “suicidal/dissociated/freaked out” to “abiding peace, happiness, and energy.” Nearly everyone can get pretty far up that spectrum. Nearly everyone can experience profound healing and become thoroughly Okay. It is your birthright.

A psychotechnology is anything that can alter your relationship with self, from mainstream talk therapy, to all kinds of meditation, to well-applied hallucinogens, to newfangled forms of therapy like IFS, etcetera.

There is no one “path,” although some traditions have clusters of practices that will make most sense taken together, just like each kind of cuisine contains an internal coherence of flavor and texture.

Find ways to bring more and more of yourself into loving awareness. Every detail of your being. The ones you like, and the ones you don’t. Especially the ones you don’t, especially the parts that most repulse you. You know, loving awareness—even if you haven’t heard the phrase before, you know what it is. Those moments of spacious, calm, thorough, tranquil connection with whatever portion of existence you’re currently exposed to, where nothing is being challenged or conceptualized, but rather is just allowed to appear, in radiant suchness, without resistance or fear. That variety of existential condition.

What it is like-Greater feelings of immersion in the world, sense of the sublime beauty of existence-Greater affection for other people, directly connected to less worrying about what they think of me-Less worrying about what type of shithead I am for not getting things done, more getting things done-Less guilt, more skillful action to repair things done wrong in the past-Easier time reaching deep meditative states, due to massive decrease in inner conflict-Everything more pleasantWhat it is not like-Mania—I am sleeping and eating and acting more or less normally, it’s just smoother and better-Lobotomization on a mood level, I am still aware of suffering in the world, and still feel sadness, it just seems less ‘personal,’ less like a threat-Lobotomization on a tactical level, being less critical of self doesn’t mean I can’t figure out what is in my self-interest-Self-absorption, I am more concerned than ever before with the well-being of others, both immediate and distant-Passivity, I feel more assertive than ever, just in different ways

A good chunk of the pain in your life, and a bunch of your maladaptive behavior, comes from conflict with the shadow, and your instinctual response—to engage more fiercely in this conflict—is exactly the opposite of what you need. If you want to move on with your life, you need to connect with and integrate your shadow or you will live in impotent inner struggle.

Stop trying to trick yourself. Understand that the maladaptive things you do satisfy your dark desires. “Having,” goes the book’s central saying, “is evidence of wanting.” Just understand why you have engineered your own despair, and admire the engineering. And then, as if by magic, you will change.If this seems confusing or unlikely or silly, that is fine. If this seems objectionable, that is also fine3. It’s just a narrative framework.

First, EK asks you to look at a situation in your life that happens, over and over again, that you don’t like.

Once your personal drama is in your mind, EK asks you to recall the sensations associated with this situation, and then try to enjoy and appreciate them.

If you have a big chunk of non-integrated shadow, what you have is a brittle self-conception. There are lots of parts of yourself that you’re constantly avoiding, and all sorts of things that happen to you that aren't supposed to. This requires vigilance. You’ve got to filter, erase, elide, and generally Photoshop your consciousness on an ongoing basis to make everything acceptable to your judgment.That filtration might have some effects on experience generally. Maybe if your mind is enforcing a heavy-handed narrative frame, some of the aesthetic properties of life go unnoticed. And maybe the complexities of other human beings are harder to perceive behind the wall of concepts you’re placing in front of them. If you could take that filter off, perhaps the world would look different, and your existence would feel smoother, more intuitive, less fragmented.

notionally, I was very self-aware. However, in truth I’d never really looked into the things I was really ashamed of—I’d just spent time mining the sort of foibles I could use as fuel for entertaining self-deprecation. In this way, I’d unintentionally been creating a semi-accurate ‘understanding of self’ that was, partially, a coping mechanism.

Like, it was so cool that I’d arranged a way to both slake my lust for affirmation and never be seen by anyone, thus remaining in safety. So ingenious how I’d permanently arranged the role of misunderstood artist for myself. It was fantastic how I could thus remain forever unknowable, unredeemable, distant, separate, but still special, praised, remarkable.

I don’t know that it’s literally true that my mind is composed of little characters with different agendas. But I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of adopting this as a lens. Instead of identifying with my unpleasant thoughts/feelings (this is me and I hate it, I suck) or fighting them (this isn’t me and I reject it), I now try to understand them as emanations of parts of me, which I then engage with in a spirit of open-hearted curiosity.

I remembered being criticized for my poor hygiene, and, moreover, how almost every time attention was brought to my physical form, it meant that something bad was about to happen. And then I did the most cliched therapy thing of all: I gave that dirty little kid a hug and told him that it was okay. In practice, this felt like releasing tension. A healthy inner space was created between me and the dirty kid in my mind. That person wasn’t identical to me, I was not my history. Simultaneously, though, I didn’t need to reject that person, either.

Every time I’d have some sort of weird inner tension—which was often—I would try to introspect, talk to different parts of myself, try to bring myself into deeper and deeper harmony, accept whatever discordant bits of consciousness I would normally reject.

One thing about my wife is that she’s a shaman. When she sees other people in distress, she’s uncannily good at figuring out whatever frequency they’re on, and helping them surf it. This is doubly true when people are on psychedelics; she could be a legitimate psychedelic healer if she wanted that life path.So, as I spiraled out near the Lululemon, she comforted me, and asked me, gently, but firmly, “what made you want to do this today?” And I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know, I thought it would be fun. She did not buy this, and, after some more comforting, said, “Did you think that the affirmation would make you happy? Like having a lot of eyeballs on you would make you worthy of love?” I begrudgingly agreed with this line of questioning. And then she said, “what part of you needs that—can you find it for me?”

I felt unusually sure of myself. But there was still, like, stuff. Maybe twice a week I’d still think about some embarrassing moment from my past and grunt in pain. Occasionally I still caught myself frantically speculating about what I could do to ensure that I remained a lovable/interesting/worthy person.

at some point, 90% of my self-image had been repaired, and, at that point, my mind’s basic disposition changed from default self-suspicion to default self-acceptance.

I realized that perhaps the main effect of my self-loathing, in my life, had been to get in the way of how much love I could show other people. Before me, in my consciousness, in what felt like 50-foot-tall neon letters, blinked the question: DO YOU HAVE THE COURAGE TO BE AS LOVING AS YOU CAN POSSIBLY BE

through shadow work, I stopped denying large parts of myself and brought them into loving awareness. Then, I continued that work in finer detail with introspective techniques, bringing more little bits of my mind into loving awareness. Then, I attacked one of my psychological monsters with loving awareness on LSD. Then, I cleaned everything up with loving awareness on MDMA.

Repression isn’t some fanciful concept, it’s a simple consequence of psychological reward and reinforcement. Things you don’t like to think about, you think about less, and slowly they become distanced from your habitual thought patterns, until they almost never enter into your mind. Therefore, you can quite easily end up in a state where you say, “I love myself,” and what you mean is, “I love all the parts of myself that I routinely think about, but I might have some icky feelings about all that stuff that I’m not quite capable of looking at right now.” This is where, I think, a lot of people are stuck.

When we ask for Deep Okayness, we are asking for you to accept everything, wholeheartedly. It is a high bar to clear.

I’ve always been a pretty goal-oriented person — but mostly because I frame my goals on a salvation scale. It’s not enough for achieving a thing to offer me exactly what I want — my brain craves anything I aim for to hold the key to everything that I need. As diabolical as this sounds, it’s extremely effective. With stakes that high, I’m willing to pull out all the stops. Failure just doesn’t feel like an option. By telling myself that whatever I’m reaching for will essentially allow me to achieve nirvana, I guarantee that motivation will never be in short supply.

But with that comes the feeling that anything but progressing through life at warp speed is probably proof that you’re doing something deeply wrong.

In my case, I want things to feel hard. How else will I know that I’m making progress? In practice, this sentiment easily leads to self-sabotage. It encourages me to pick projects and people that give my overactive brain a silly sudoku-like game to play while matching my mind’s stock image of “meaningfulness.”

Your brain might be able to whip up a five-page single-spaced essay outlining exactly what you want and need in extensive detail, but your heart will always have the last word (and trust me, they will fit on a post-it).

We seem to be afraid brevity might make us look unintelligent or uninformed. Over-intellectualizing our decisions to signal we understand the complexity of the world is now the new norm.

it’s a good sign when things feel remarkably simple and wordlessly right. And when they do, it’s interesting to look around and notice how incredibly irrelevant speed is.